The Blue Dogs Roll Over
How they abet Pelosi's spending agenda.
How's this for a neat trick? Hours before Congress departed for its Memorial Day break last Friday, House Democrats approved another $116 billion in new welfare and other spending, raised $82 billion in new taxes on investment and business, and increased the national debt by another $54.7 billion. None of this was offset with spending cuts.
Yet Blue Dog Democrats are celebrating this latest fiscal blowout as a triumph. Gerald Connolly of Virginia even declared that from now on "there is going to be a fiscal standard that is, frankly, much more rigorous." When exactly?
The real story here is that the Blue Dogs again rolled over to abet their liberal party leadership. Early last week the Blue Dogs joined Republican complaints that the original "jobs bill" from Ways and Means Chairman Sander Levin was too expensive at $191 billion. But instead of insisting on spending cuts to pay for unemployment benefits, farm subsidies and corporate welfare, House leaders cleverly split the spending and tax package into two separate bills so the debt totals would look smaller.
The first bill included business tax cut extensions, the welfare spending and the $82 billion in business tax hikes. That passed with 215 votes, including 34 Blue Dogs.
Next came the "doc fix" that raised Medicare reimbursement rates for physicians at a cost of $21 billion, which passed with 245 votes, including 41 Blue Dogs. Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew that the Blue Dogs wouldn't cross the American Medical Association.
The big losers are taxpayers because most of the alleged savings are phony. Some of the cost reduction comes from dropping $30 billion to extend health-care benefits to unemployed workers and higher Medicaid payments to states—spending that House leaders vow they'll enact later when the hullabaloo over the deficit dies down.
The biggest scam is how Democrats shaved some $40 billion off the 10-year price tag for the Medicare doc fix. Instead of extending it through 2014 as in the original Levin bill, the Blue Dog version extends it only through 2012. Everyone in Washington knows this policy will be extended in future years, or doctors would have to take a 30% pay cut when treating Medicare patients. This is similar to the trickery Democrats used to pretend that ObamaCare would pay for itself.
The Blue Dog caucus of 54 Members had the power to stop this latest Treasury raid simply by joining with House Republicans. But in three years, the Blue Dog coalition has not forced Democrats to offset spending with even $1 of cutbacks in other domestic programs—though most agencies have grown by 40% to 50% in two years.
Blue Dogs also claim to be defenders of the "pay as you go" budget rule, but in three years their leaders have declared more than $1 trillion of spending as an "emergency" that avoids that rule. Indiana's Baron Hill, a co-chairman of the Blue Dogs, insisted last year that the caucus could only support the $862 billion stimulus if it was followed up with "statutory paygo." He's still waiting. Paygo in practice is nothing more than a talking point to justify tax increases, and to let the Blue Dogs appear to be fiscal conservatives when they are really big spending enablers.
The political game is to give Mrs. Pelosi as many votes as she needs to pass her priorities, while giving individual Blue Dogs an occasional pass to oppose bills that still become law. Thus 46 Blue Dogs voted for the stimulus, 39 for the 2010 budget, and 28 for ObamaCare. In the weeks ahead, Democrats plan to vote on a $23 billion emergency education bill to rehire 100,000 teachers. That also won't be paid for. There will be a $60 billion emergency supplemental war spending bill, also unpaid for, but the Blue Dogs will undoubtedly provide enough votes to pass both.
The Tom DeLay Republicans lost their majority in part because they lost their way on spending. But since Mrs. Pelosi became speaker in 2007, the national debt has risen by more than $3.5 trillion. Democrats have placed America on a path to borrow an average of $1 trillion a year for the next decade, which is more than was borrowed from 1776 to 2000.
This is the real Blue Dog fiscal legacy, because Speaker Pelosi couldn't have passed all of this without them. As another election looms, the Blue Dogs are once again rolling out their "fiscal discipline" protective cover, running almost as Republicans as Mark Critz recently did to prevail in Pennsylvania's 12th district. We'll soon learn if the Blue Dogs can fool enough of the people one more time.
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